I remember hearing about Roberto as a child. He was already a legend in Africa, and a legend in my country by the time he was twenty-three. While in his twenties, his thirties, his forties, and his fifties, he was the only man all of the nobles, aristocratic families, politicians, and super rich people wanted to go on a safari with. They would pay, and pay well, to go out on a safari and collect a trophy or two that they would treasure and proudly display; and it would remind them of the experience of a lifetime. You won’t believe the amount of money a hunt commands, but once you know what a hunt consists of, you’ll sure as hell understand why.

In the 1950’s Africa was still beautiful, unknown, and exotic. In fields were just seas of lions, seas of elephants, and seas of rhinos. It was truly untapped, raw, unadulterated jungle. Africa has always been a very primal country, a country filled with tremendous natural energy, and if you think about it, Africans never had an alphabet, never had any traditions other than that of oral stories, and their oral traditions and ability to manipulate language are the only thing that separates them from pure animals. Let’s not confuse the Africans with the Nubians, or Egyptians. There are people with black skin, and there are people with Negro features, and these are two different types of people originating from different geographic locations.

The European world brought what they felt was some sense of order to the chaos for brief periods of time, and they introduced many things, mainly a concept of economics and material wealth. Africans now knew of a life they perceived to be better, and never thought about any consequences concerning their county and people. Africans aren’t unified in the slightest, and consciously and unconsciously have been allowing themselves and there country to be raped. They don’t see and are not aware of the big picture, but that isn’t my point. One factor of many in the raping of Africa was the prestige associated with having ivory piano keys, ivory billiard balls, or ivory carved sculptures in the western world.

Another factor is the rich Arab kings, when there sons were coming of age, they needed a knife handle made from the horn of a rhino. You know the male rhino copulates on top of the female, and copulation takes four to five hours. This is literally tons of weight on a female for hours at a time, and those sick Arabs believe that somehow having a knife with a rhino’s horn as a handle will bring them and their sons power.

The Chinese diplomats with there diplomatic immunity are perhaps the worst of the bunch because they are able to just stroll through airports and customs like the wind, giving the Africans more money than they’d make in twenty years for one rhino horn, just so they can powder it up, make hundreds of thousands of dollars selling grams of this shit, helping all the Chinese men get their little dicks hard. For the wealthy Chinese, the rhino horn is an essential aphrodisiac.

For my entire life I always wanted to be a professional hunter just like Roberto. I had posters and newspaper clippings of him on my walls. Now a days, if one was to say they hunt elephants, all the red flags go up, but that’s just because people are ignorant and don’t understand there are hunters, and then there are hunters. There are people who shoot and kill infant elephants, cutting off their ivory tusks and allowing the carcasses to rot, and then there are those who hunt the seventy and eighty year old elephants that are starving to death on their last set of teeth, in their last phase of life.

I always had an affinity and respect for the Native American culture, although there have never been any in my county. They had a wonderful understanding of all nature, and all life, just as the greatest African safari hunters. Native Americans are in a class of their own, and can be compared to no other people living or extinct. Back to hunting, it is a dangerous endeavor; don’t think it’s easy to kill an elephant, or kill rhino, or lion because they are so big. And hunters for the past hundred years or so have been using guns; it isn’t like a gun is a modern invention that makes hunting the big three a joke.

Elephants are extremely smart, and they know when a human is following them; they are also capable of blending in with the jungle. You might have five or six around you at any given time, and not even see them. Don’t think that because they are so big, they are easy to spot, easy to shoot. And when you do get a shot, you only get one shot. You must shoot them in a virtual line leading from their eye to their ear—you only have about a six-inch square. If you don’t hit that square and put the elephant on it’s knees with one shot, one kill shot, you’re going to have a mountain of muscle and rage coming right towards you and instantly kill you.

Do you have any idea how fast an elephant can run? They can go through hundreds of yards of dense foliage and deep jungle, shit that would be up to your waste, and go through it in a matter of seconds. You must run around the trees, and maneuver through this labyrinth, whereas the elephant just plows through everything in its path. One of the most magnificent, scary, and powerful forces I’ve ever seen and experienced in my entire life.

Elephants, rhinos, lions surely know the difference between a tourist wanting to take a picture of them, and a poacher, or a hunter. I remember on one hunt, I was tracking an elderly elephant, one who was on his last set of molars, and I noticed three sets of tracks in total. You see the elderly elephant leaves the pack when he’s on his seventh and last set of molars, but two, sometimes three elephants are sent off with him into the jungle to protect him and allow him to die in peace. Although the elderly male is wasting away and looks like a grey drape hung over a massive skeleton, he can surely kill you and take care of himself. One must realize that if you want to take a shot at this starving infuriated creature, you’re going to have two elephants, or three elephants come at you from any given direction and there is a better than good chance that you will die.

So, this one time I had “the fever.” I mean I had to kill this elephant. I was going to get this one. I had been following and tracking this elderly chap for days. He was taking me 50, sometimes more kilometers a day through the thickest jungle in Africa. He was always so far in front of me, or positioned in such a way that I never could get the shot I needed, and he definitely knew this. I could just see him withering away, he was starving to death, and all that remained were these big beautiful tusks—I’d say they weighed about 225-280 pounds.

Before long, I realized I was hundreds of kilometers away from my camp, I had blisters the size of pancakes on the souls of my feet, I had no more food or water, and he beat me. He thoroughly exhausted me. I had to give up the hunt. I wasn’t going to get him, because if I did—and even if the elephants guarding him didn’t kill me, I would have died shortly after capturing my trophy. I didn’t have enough energy to kill him, cut his tusks off, and lug them through thick jungle with no food or water. I barely had enough in me to get myself back to camp.

You see, elephants don’t regenerate their tusks—once you cut them off, they’re gone because they’re fixed to bone. Now rhino’s on the other hand, you can cut their horn off, and it will grow back because it’s connected to loose cartilage. Nowadays, because the rhino population is so small, I have a rhino farm in Africa and pay two men at all times armed to the teeth to go everywhere my rhinos go. If anyone tries to harm them, these guys are going to kill the culprits. The African government protects the rhino, and helps me protect the rhino, more than it protects people. There is a big business with rhino horns, they command tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that’s just for one horn.

So, when there horn gets big enough, I shoot them with a tranquilizer gun, chainsaw it off, and when they regain consciousness, although a little groggy and upset, they are still alive and able to produce another horn for me again in the future. The horn is the price they pay for living because without me paying to protect them and their big beautiful horn out in the jungle, they would have been dead long ago and the population would be completely extinct.
Lions are in my opinion the saddest story or the bunch, and after I killed my first one, I vowed never to kill another, unless of course in self-defense. If I have to choose the lion or myself, I choose myself. Lions, just looking at them, you can approximate their age, but I don’t care if they are five minutes away from a death by natural causes, I just hate killing an animal solely for a head to hang on my wall, a mane, or for some bitch to wear a fancy lion jacket, or have a really robust rug in her dining room.

So back to Roberto; by the time I was in my twenties, he was in his forties, and I read in the paper that he was going to have a conference in Italy having to do with Safari’s in general, but more specifically about the dwindling population of wild rhino’s and lions. I knew I just must meet him, at the very least shake his hand and tell him he had been my hero for as long as I could remember.

After his conference, there were hundreds of people, and numerous reporters—all wanting to ask him questions, or have a picture with him, and I felt somewhat defeated. I thought it would be thoroughly impossible for me to meet him. My dream of becoming a professional hunter in Africa was slowly dying in my mind because after all I knew nothing other than his accomplishments. I didn’t have the slightest idea about how to legally obtain the necessary licenses, or how to hunt and track these animals for that matter. I mean everything I knew about hunting in Africa I read or heard about, things I’ve dreamed up and imagined.

After waiting around for two hours to speak with him, I realized it was going to be impossible, so with much reservation I decided to walk to the train station and travel back to my home. The very next day, I woke up like usual and went to my local coffee bar, and who was standing at the bar enjoying an espresso with a small crowd of folks around him, none other than my hero. Apparently, his mother lives in my very same town, and he was visiting her.
I approached him, and introduced myself, and told him it is my dream of becoming a professional hunter. He asked me if I was attending a University, and I told him the truth. I attended a University just for the sake of my parents who wanted me to, and I was finished with a degree in Civil Engineering. He was very impressed that I was able to accomplish this difficult task at such a young age. Then he said, “Are you employed now?” And when I told him I wasn’t he asked me if I’d like to work with him because he has never seen such an enthusiastic respectful young adult, and he had a gut feeling about me. He told me to meet him at the very same coffee bar tomorrow morning with my identity card, my passport, and we would be in business. We were to leave for Africa in three days.

He wrote for me a list of everything I needed to buy—everything from what type of boots and socks, to what type of watch I should have—he said when we arrived in Africa he would have rifles, knives, and all hunting implements necessary for life on a safari. “When it comes to hunting there is only one type of rifle to use, and I know for a fact at this point in time you can’t afford one my boy, so I will provide you with your very own.”

Roberto made my dream come true. Hear I was going to Africa with the man, the myth, the legend himself; and he is going to take me under his wings because his intuition spoke to him and he had a good gut feeling. Well, I’m sure I don’t need to talk about the sheer madness, panic, excitement and bliss than ensued for those three days. It was a complete whirlwind, a surreal experience. It was my first time going anywhere. My first time leaving my country, my home, everything I know, and I was going to Africa for eight months. Before you know it, poof, I was there and felt like I’ve always been there.

The first thing I noticed was the heat. It was energizing. I am Italian, I complain when it’s too cold, I complain when it’s too hot, but I do love the heat; and it was hot. As soon as we got off the plane, Roberto’s men picked us in Jeeps. It was a three Jeep parade and I remember feeling comforted. I wasn’t taken back by the artillery of weapons, I wasn’t taken back by these tall slender blacker than black individuals speaking a language I never heard before, but understood. I felt like one of the team, and I had only gotten off the plane. I took no preconceived notions with me, and realized that I was about to experience, enter, and come to know a completely different world.

Roberto had a sophisticated operation with outposts in urban centers and occasional camps linked together by barely visible paths cut out by machetes. All these paths somehow were all linked together leading deep into the heart of the Africa. In the urban centers is where we met our clients, and deep into the heart of the jungle is where we brought them.

As sophisticated as a system as all this might sound, there is no pesto, fresh bread, and any modern amenity in the jungle. There are creatures I’ve never seen before, animals that look like plants, plants that look like animals. There are parts of my body that hurt, or are irritated that I didn’t even know existed. I was on sensory overload every second of everyday all for the thrill of what Roberto calls the humanitarian hunt. No one gets hurt, and an old warrior rests in peace.

Battling the elements, battling confrontational natives, battling fears, battling inhumane hunters and poachers, feeling lonely—I could go on and on, but all of this is secondary. When you know you’re moments away from that kill shot, it’s all worth it. You feel nothing at all except anticipation and excitement. And you know you have done many things right, otherwise this opportunity would have never arisen.

Africa is very different today. Africa is also my home. I love the people, I love the country, and I hope it can get back to what it once was, what it should be. And there are no hunters left like Roberto; no hunters left like myself. The entire continent of Africa has changed, and everyone has had to adapt to these climates of confusion. But in short, I wouldn’t change a thing, and I am honored to have studied under and know the best of the best. I see a bright future because I believe the people of Africa are close to uniting. They are closer than ever and have a sense of urgency because if things continue to go the way they do, in the next hundred years, there will be nothing natural or beautiful about this continent. The youth of Africa is determined.